The situation creates the impression that the U.S. government could help public companies protect the user information they handle, but choose instead to insert secret backdoors into chips and other hardware and commercial software to aid surveillance efforts.

On the other hand, the IC cannot give up the mechanisms for its Top Secret network or else Intelink will be useless. So like other military inventions that have reached the public (e.g. GPS), the public must be a few steps behind.

Interestingly, the interaction of those two perspectives is central to the current debate created by the disclosures facilitated by Edward Snowden.